What Bitcoin Did

“This is like DEFCON 5. This is a catastrophe.”

The debt crisis is already here. Governments are spending far beyond their means, inflation is quietly eating away at living standards, and the only real escape route is more debasement dressed up as growth. Add in an energy shock, AI driven job losses, and rising social unrest, and the question stops being whether the system is breaking. It becomes how long they can keep it going.

In this episode, I sit down with Lyn Alden to break down the real state of the global economy. We get into why sovereign debt crises are a slow moving process, why the US has already crossed into a new era of fiscal dominance, and why Lyn believes the Strait of Hormuz is the biggest macro risk in the world right now. We also discuss inflation, war, food and energy shortages, AI replacing white collar work, the path toward UBI, and whether this debt cycle could be the one that finally pushes the fiat system to its limit. Plus, Lyn shares the personal story behind her rise, from homelessness as a child to becoming one of the most respected macro thinkers in the world.

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“We’re subject to monetary domination. We can’t do without money because the vast majority of people have absolutely no say over how money works. That’s an injustice.”

In this episode, I sit down with philosopher Bradley Rettler in Bedford to explore two questions that are going to define the future: what AI is doing to human thought, and whether our monetary system is fundamentally unjust.

We get into what thinking actually is, whether LLMs are really thinking, and why using AI as a substitute for your own reasoning may make you worse at reasoning for yourself. Bradley explains why this matters, not just for productivity, but for education, moral agency, and the risk that a small number of companies could end up shaping how millions of people think.

We then turn to Bradley’s new paper on monetary justice. He breaks down the idea of monetary domination, how the Fed and the commercial banking system concentrate power over money creation, and why that leaves most people trapped inside a system they have no meaningful say over. We also get into where Bitcoin fits into all of this, whether it offers an escape from monetary domination, and why the divide between Bitcoin as freedom money and Bitcoin as digital gold is becoming harder to ignore.

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"No innovation will ever change the world more than 2%. Even Bitcoin." Junseth is a Bitcoin OG who's been here since a week after pizza day. He returns to challenge every narrative the tech world is selling you, from AI replacing all jobs to the metaverse that never existed.

Junseth makes the case that the future is being imagined by people who think the best state of the world is living in your bedroom and never coming out, and that the rest of us don't have to elect to live in that world. He explains why AI adoption will be far slower than anyone thinks, why the people predicting the end of jobs are still hiring programmers, and why the Gell-Mann amnesia effect means you shouldn't trust any of the expert timelines.

We also get into whether Bitcoin has actually done anything yet, why Bitcoin is boring and that's a good thing, the emergence of political factions and BIP 110, whether AI consciousness and belief in God are diametrically opposed, why the agent economy might reshape the internet, and why if you lose your job you should just go start a trash bin cleaning business.

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"If there's going to be printing, it's going to be the hardest printing they've ever done. There isn't another option." Eric Yakes returns to break down the macro landscape as global debt hits historic levels, private credit shows real cracks, and the commodity shift accelerates under geopolitical fracture.

Eric explains why the gold rally isn't about one event but a structural inflection point decades in the making, why private credit could be the next financial crisis and how the only path forward likely involves the hardest printing central banks have ever done.

We also get into AI's second-order effects on startups and job markets, why the agent economy could be a major bridge to Bitcoin adoption, the death of proprietary software, the quantum narrative versus the actual threat, and why Bitcoin at $70K is deep value.

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At 5am, Lauren Rodriguez woke to laser sights, a drone flying through her house, and 40 armed federal agents raiding their cottage, all because her husband built a Bitcoin wallet.

Keonne Rodriguez co-founded Samurai Wallet in 2015, a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet with privacy features including Whirlpool, their CoinJoin implementation. For nearly a decade, the wallet operated openly on the Google Play Store with no issues. Then on April 24th, 2024, the FBI and IRS launched coordinated raids on the Rodriguez home in Pennsylvania and co-founder Bill Hill's home in Portugal.

The charges: conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money service business and conspiracy to money launder. The problem: FinCEN's own guidance stated that non-custodial wallets are not money transmitters. And six months before indictment, prosecutors asked FinCEN directly whether Samurai was a money service business, FinCEN said no. The prosecutors buried that answer, a Brady violation.

Lauren walks through the full story; the raid, the discovery process involving 17 terabytes of evidence, the sudden judicial switch from a neutral judge to a former chief of the SDNY criminal division, the five-minute hearing where every defense motion was denied without explanation, and the impossible math of a plea deal versus a 25-year trial exposure with a hostile judge.

Keonne is now serving a five-year federal prison sentence. Lauren is fighting for a presidential pardon for both Keonne and Bill.

Sign the petition and support their case at BillandKeonne.org.

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Sign the Petition & Donate: https://billandkeonne.org/